Paris Photo 2025: Essential Exhibitions Beyond The Grand Palais
A cultural primer for the week ahead, this guide highlights key exhibitions taking place across the city during Paris Photo, from major museum retrospectives to experimental presentations, offering readers an overview of what to see and where to go amid one of photography’s most anticipated moments in the events calendar.
1000 Words | Resource | 7 Nov 2025
Join us on Patreon
Luc Delahaye, The Echo of the World – Jeu de Paume
10 October – 4 January
Long recognised for his vastly significant contributions to the field of contemporary photography, Luc Delahaye is the focus of a monographic exhibition at Jeu de Paume showcasing work that spans the last 25 years. During this time, Delahaye has notably transitioned from photojournalism to fine art photography, deliberately moving away from the immediacy of reportage toward the creation of monumental, painterly tableaux that often depict the aftermath of war, the solemnity of international summits or the quiet dignity of displaced individuals. The exhibition, the first in Paris to show Delahaye’s work since 2005, brings together approximately 40 large-format photographs, including previously unseen works and a video installation centred on the Syrian conflict, and is a testament to the documentary form as it tipped into crafted construction.
Rebekka Deubner, Thermal Seasons – Shmorévaz, Photo Saint Germain
6 November – 29 November
For close to a month, Photo Saint-Germain animates venues across the Left Bank with a rolling programme of exhibitions. In the experimental, independent space of Shmorévaz, housed in a former shop and known for its feminist, queer, erotic and political programming, Rebekka Deubner’s Thermal Seasons (a work in progress since 2021) explores the usage of thermal contraception, probing intimacy, parenthood, masculinities, and the gendered distribution of mental labour. Through her careful, intimate gaze on bodies in close proximity, and her attention to the rhythms of communal life, Deubner restores them a kind of tender plasticity, offering a delicate vision of masculinity.
Edward Weston, Becoming Modern – MEP
15 October – 25 January
MEP pays tribute to the celebrated American photographer Edward Weston, offering a unique for Parisiens and visitors to Paris to experience the richness and precision of his modernist vision. Through more than one hundred vintage prints drawn entirely from the prestigious collection of the Wilson Centre for Photography, the exhibition reveals Weston’s fascination with form, texture and the interplay of light and shadow, alongside the gaze and pioneering practice that marked a major turning point in the history of photography. In tandem, MEP also presents the first solo exhibition in France by famed contemporary photographer Tyler Mitchell, meanwhile in the Studio space, the ever fascinating Felipe Romero Beltrán’s image-based series Dialect documents the liminal lives of nine young Moroccan minors navigating the asylum process in Spain.
Donna Gottschalk and Hélène Giannecchini with Carla Williams, (Nos Autres) We Others – Le Bal
20 June – 16 November
Donna Gottschalk and Carla Williams make their French debut in Le Bal’s latest exhibition, We Others, accompanied by an interpretive text by Hélène Giannecchini, bringing together first-person narratives and a wide range of photographs spanning decades to tell stories, explore invisibility and consider intergenerational connections. Gottschalk’s work, inseparable from the emerging movements for LGBT+ rights in which she was involved at a time when homosexual relationships were still illegal in the United States, is situated alongside Williams’ intimate self-portraits, continuing the memory and preservation of marginalised queer lives and framing archival practice as relational and intergenerational. The exhibition’s spatial design and vivid atmosphere owe much to Julie Héraut’s thoughtful curation and deft scenography of Cyril Delhomme, and powerfully forms a bio-dimensional experience that visitors have typically come to expect from this important institution.
Hoda Afshar, Performing the Invisible – Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
30 September – 25 January
Hoda Afshar’s first major French solo takes place at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, uniting two chapters of her work: Speak the Wind (2015–20) and The Fold (2023–25). The latter draws on archival research at the museum, confronting orientalist and colonial legacies through photographs taken by psychiatrist Gaëtan de Clérambault in Morocco between 1918 and 1919. Speak the Wind, meanwhile, traces the beliefs, myths and stories carried on the winds that shape life on the islands of the Strait of Hormuz. Across photography, video, sound and printed mirrors, the unique installation threads Afshar’s projects into the living lines of her research. ♦
–1000 Words
Images:
1-Luc Delahaye, Trading Floor, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
2-Rebekka Deubner, Felix en sicile, 2022
3-Edward Weston, Charis, Santa Monica (Nude in doorway), 1936. Courtesy Wilson Centre of Photography
4-Donna Gottschalk, Self-portrait during a GLF meeting, E. 9th Street, New York, 1970
5-Hoda Afshar, Speak the Wind, 2015-20
1000 Words favourites
• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism
• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age
• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect
• Discover London’s top five photography galleries
• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani
• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För
• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community
• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member
• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza
Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse
